Where Atheism Can Get You Killed

Joseph Allchin is a freelance journalist. He covers Bangladesh for the Financial Times, and writes for diverse publications such as the Economist, the New York Times, Foreign Policy & others. Follow him on twitter @j_allchin.

On Tuesday of last week, Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, had just left his house in the northeastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet when four masked assailants chased and then hacked the bank clerk to death with machetes. He was the third secular blogger hacked to pieces on the streets of Bangladesh this year. The targeted killing of minorities and dissenting intellectuals is part of what turned the country’s independence struggle from East Pakistan into one of the late 20th century’s genocides in 1971. The brutal theologically inspired murders in today’s Bangladesh mimic those gruesome pogroms. The worrying question asked of Bangladesh now is whether it is coming to resemble the quasi-theocratic state so many Bangladeshis fought to leave—Pakistan.

It’s not a new concern. Over the decades I’ve visited this young nation of 160 million people, the rise in religiosity has been a fiercely debated. The questions are many: Are there more veils worn on the bustling arteries of its cities and towns? How can the empowerment of the country’s women be balanced with their daily acts of religious submission? And, most controversially, what can be done to protect religious minorities and the country’s traditions of religious pluralism?

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Rejections of faith, questioning and godlessness are as indigenous to this region as is the staple food, rice. As early as 600 BC the ideas of Carvaka, a philosophy that rejected then-predominant Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, was openly debated and contemplated. That former tolerance is being lost.

Despite being a nominally secular nation, Bangladesh has seen the proportion of religious minorities slowly bleed away. In just over 40 years, non-Islamic minorities have gone from around 30 percent of the population to around 10 percent now. Minority religious expression is now conspicuous by its absence. In the capital Dhaka, where I am based, reminders of this variegated society come seldom, for instance in the glimpse of a Hindu idol in my hole-in-the-wall barber shop. Low caste Hindus perform this traditionally “impure” profession, even in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

The current ruling Awami League party is nominally secular and has promised to try local collaborators of the 1971 genocide that accompanied the violent birth of the nation. The accused are largely ageing leaders from the largest Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the years since independence, military dictators rehabilitated these leaders, desperate for any legitimacy they could extract from their perceived piety. Some have even served as government ministers for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which ruled between 2001 and 2006. The powerful positions of the accused stirred concern that they could be spared justice.

In response, recently slain blogger Ananta Bijoy Das and fellow citizens roused the online community in spring 2013 and rare, long lasting popular protests ensued. These protests were named after the junction where the protesters gathered: Shabagh. The jubilant, liberal atmosphere of the protests was striking at time. It seemed that, perhaps, hanging the old Islamists who had spent their youths raping and murdering could purge the country of its many problems. Swap the “peace now” banner of an anti-war march in Washington DC with “faschi chai”—which means “we want a hanging”—and you get the picture.

The response to these protests was vengeful and aggressive. An opposition BNP leader, Mahmudur Rahman, and his tabloid news outlet, Amar Desh, which translates to “My Country,” ran a counter-campaign. Rahman sensed that the Shabagh protests had captured the national imagination and could threaten his party’s grip on power. The BNP’s ideological position is wedded to the inviolability of the country’s Islamic identity. Opponents of the protests ran a campaign erroneously claiming that those who had started the Shabagh protests were atheists, hell bent on destroying Islam.

Many who had rallied the Shabagh protests were atheists. But many at the protest were not. As I photographed the crowds, I noted that some of the most enthusiastic were dressed with the classic skull cap, beard and flowing robes, signifying they were practicing Muslims.

Regardless, the bloggers who had sparked the Shabagh protests were targeted. A list of some 80 people was circulated. The Amar Desh paper published lists of alleged atheists, including the real names of those writing under pen names and where they lived. They also published smear stories about the bloggers. For instance, the paper twisted bloggers’ criticisms of public spending on mosques to allege that these bloggers wanted to “destroy mosques,” says now exiled blogger Asif Mohiuddin.

The first name on the list to die was a young architect called Ahmed Rajib Haider, whose disfigured corpse was found near his house in February 2013. The previous month blogger Asif Mohiuddin was stabbed near-fatally and hospitalized. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, initially appeared to offer sympathy. But the political costs of associating with atheists became too much. Instead of support, Mohiuddin and several fellow bloggers were jailed, for “offending religious sensibilities.” Meanwhile, members of the largest faith in the country were free to shout as loud as they could that people who disbelieve should be hung.

This is exactly what they did in Spring 2013 in huge protests calling for the death penalty for atheists. These were a response to the Shabagh protests and the prominence that they had achieved. The Islamist protests were organized by a group emanating from a network of religious schools (madrassas) known as Hefezat-e-Islam. Their march was a tightly packed crowd of perhaps half a million men. (I saw no females except two decrepit beggars I photographed on the outer edges.) The crowd was raucous in a way soccer crowds can be. Young men expressing hate with joyful abandon, reveling in camaraderie.

Many protesters were keen to know of my faith. I did my best to fake belief so no one would scent the absence of religion in me as I picked my way through the sweaty mass that afternoon. On the whole, those I met were welcoming and one member of the Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders are on trial for war crimes, lent me his skull cap, which helped reassure all concerned.

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This is not the first time Bangladeshi atheists have lived under the threat of violence. In 2005 the atheist writer Humayun Azad was attacked. His friend, the blogger Asif Mohiuddin (the one who was stabbed near fatally in 2013), remembers the last time he spoke with him. Azad didn't believe that it was Mohiuddin on the phone. Azad, says Mohouddin, had been driven into a paranoid psychosis from the incessant calls and threats he was receiving. Azad would die a broken and disturbed man in exile in Germany.

Mohiuddin was fortunate to escape to Germany himself. The 2013 attack left him unable to move his neck. He says he has trouble sleeping. When Ananta Bijoy Das was hacked to death last week, Mohiuddin was trying to help him leave, he says. Mohiuddin’s three comrades who he was jailed with in July 2013, Mashiur Rahman Biplob, Russel Pervez and Subrata Adhikari Shuvo have not been so lucky. They have all disappeared from public life. One is fighting for permanent asylum abroad. The other two are still struggling to escape.

In Bangladesh, there is huge stigma attached to not being part of a religious community. It’s a much more extreme version of public opinion in the States, where atheists are, according to Pew, amongst the most reviled communities. Ironically, in the US Muslims are the only group viewed less favorably. But in Bangladesh the consequences of public atheism prevents all but the very brave criticizing faith, or standing up for those who do.

The Prime Minister’s son, Sajeeb Joy Wazed, admitted as much when interviewed about this year’s first blogger victim, naturalized US citizen Avijit Roy, who had returned to the nation of his birth to launch a book. According to Reuters, after Roy was killed, Wazed said, “We don’t want to be seen as atheists…we can’t come out strongly for [Avijit Roy]. It’s about perception, not about reality.”

That perception was so strong that the government went as far as jailing their own minister, Abdul Latif Siddique, for saying, whilst in New York, that he thought the Islamic pilgrimage, the Hajj, was a waste of money. Islamists protested the benign comments and called for his death. He has now largely been forgotten in jail. But that’s unsurprising given how few in Bangladesh care for those who disbelieve. Atheists are, according to one very senior member of the opposition BNP, “sub-human.”

No one can object to the perceived piety of 90 percent of the population. Whenever someone questions dominant orthodoxy they are smeared as attacking the community itself. In Bangladesh, those smears now lead to public butchering. This is partly because religious institutions pick up much of the slack of schooling. This creates its own tyranny of consensus where individuals compete to be more “righteous”—where the unquestioned “goodness” of “our” faith becomes synonymous and interchangeable with a communal identity, one that is continually portrayed as under threat.

This narrowing of acceptable beliefs is as costly and chilling to the diverse, rich variety of Islamic traditions as to the non-believer. If Bangladesh continues to follow its current path, all notions of secular rights could soon be completely drowned out by resurgent, all-pervasive conservative Islam.